


Carrying the Bull

by Marauder_the_Slash_Nymph



Series: 2004 [2]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: 2004, Are you there God? It's me Elio, Bisexuality, Elio is thirty-eight and still a little bratty, Engagement, M/M, Massage, OMG Marzia is pregnant, Oliver grew a beard, Same-Sex Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 02:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15378591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marauder_the_Slash_Nymph/pseuds/Marauder_the_Slash_Nymph
Summary: Elio and Oliver are getting married in two weeks, and Elio is thinking about rabbis, fatherhood, monogamy, Oliver's ex-wives, letters, Aeschines, calves, quilts, sex, God, and mothers. Movie-verse. Sequel to Hyphenating.





	Carrying the Bull

**Author's Note:**

> I see the book and the movie as different works, and don't assume that things that were true in the book are also true in the movie if those things didn't actually appear in the movie. Elio in the book and Elio in the movie are somewhat different creatures when it comes to their sexual behaviors and histories. This is a movie-verse fic, so this is Movie Elio.

**August 2004**

“Explain again why it’s too late to fire Levinson,” Elio says, watching as Oliver dries the frying pan.

The wedding is in two weeks, and a couple hours ago they had a final meeting with the officiating rabbi. Elio would be perfectly fine with getting married in a courthouse, as long as his parents and Johanna were there; but Oliver, who married both of his ex-wives in a synagogue, wants the same for his marriage to Elio. Nathan Roth, Oliver’s rabbi, lives in New York state and isn’t licensed to perform marriages in Massachusetts. He referred them to Allen Levinson, and Elio is positive that Rabbi Levinson considers Elio to be a bad Jew. First of all, he wanted to know why Elio didn’t have any connections to any rabbis in Massachusetts, seeing as Elio’s lived in the state since finishing graduate school more than twelve years ago. Second – 

“You’re surprised that a rabbi thinks your daughter should have a bat mitzvah?”

“No, but I’m surprised that he tried to make me feel like shit about it. Is it too much to ask that our wedding not be officiated by someone who thinks I’m failing as a father?”

Second, Levinson, knowing Elio has a twelve-year-old daughter, tried to make small talk about how Elio would have another big event to plan next year, only to be told that Johanna wasn’t having a bat mitzvah. “It’s in our custody documents, no religious rituals,” says Elio. “And then, did you notice when he said the thing about strict monogamy? He looks at me like, ‘That means don’t breed with another shiksa, Elio.’”

Oliver closes the cupboard and turns around. “I think you’re being a little sensitive about this.”

“I am not,” Elio protests, though he knows he probably is. Johanna is his _piccina_ , and his role as her father is a sore spot for him.

Veronica – Elio’s daughter’s mother, who he can’t even call his ex-girlfriend, because they weren’t really dating – is a lapsed Catholic who is becoming progressively more unlapsed the older she gets, although she still plays bass for a band called The Courtesans. Elio and Veronica have argued about everything related to Johanna’s upbringing since the moment Veronica told Elio she was pregnant. _Maybe we should get married,_ Elio had said, impulsively, only to have Veronica retort, _why, so I’ll be stuck taking care of a baby and you?_

“Let’s ditch Levinson,” Elio says. “Let’s book an appointment with a judge and do the religious part later if you want.”

“Elio.” Oliver sits down next to Elio at the kitchen table and cups his face, the pad of his thumb resting on Elio’s cheekbone. His eyes are searching Elio’s. “I have waited too long for this, all right? I’ve waited too long to be with you.”

“So be with me. I said we could still get married – “

“We’ve got everything all set up and we’re not changing it now just because Levinson rubs you the wrong way. He doesn’t have to be your favorite person to officiate at your wedding.” Oliver smiles. “I think Heather’s rabbi thought I was an idiot.”

Heather is Oliver’s second ex-wife, who he married six months after she beat him in a poker tournament. Elio’s seen a couple of pictures – Heather and Oliver with Aaron, Alex and Julie at Aaron’s bar mitzvah, the same group again at Aaron’s middle school graduation. Heather is – or was, while she was married to Oliver – young, blonde, busty, and flashy, as if Oliver had chosen her to telegraph the message, _No, I am not attracted to men. I never spent six weeks lusting after Elio Perlman in the summer of nineteen eighty-three. I did not get fucked on my hands and knees in Bergamo. You must have me confused with a different Oliver Weiss, PhD._ Julie, Oliver’s first ex-wife and the mother of his sons, is petite and dark-haired. “You’ve got some varied tastes in women,” Elio commented when he first saw a picture of Heather. Oliver shrugged; Elio watched him for a moment. “Do you actually like women?”

“I do,” Oliver said slowly.

“But not as much as you like men.”

“Women interest me,” Oliver told him after a few seconds had passed. “But men fascinate me.”

“Fine,” Elio tells him now. “We’ll keep Levinson. Consider it a wedding present. Are you done with the dishes?”

“All done.”

Elio smiles. “Speaking of rubbing me, want to have massage night?”

They have “nights” now – massage night, fantasy night, Elio-is-a-spoiled-brat-and-needs-to-be-disciplined night – because they finally, finally live together and get to wake up in the same bed every morning. And they’re getting married in two weeks. And moving to a new house, which they own together. And they’re hyphenating their last names, and Elio feels like a ludicrous teenager with an obsessive crush again, as if he should be writing Oliver’s name over and over in the margins of a notebook.

In the bedroom, Oliver puts a towel on the bed and reaches for the massage oil that he keeps in his nightstand drawer. “I still can’t believe Marzia sent us this,” he says, watching Elio as Elio slowly gets undressed.

Elio lets his shirt fall on the floor and sets his glasses on the dresser. “She thinks she’s funny.”

“Still no chance of her making the wedding?”

“Still no chance. Her doctor said she might have to go on bed rest.” He unbuttons his shorts and pulls them and his boxers over his half-hard cock. “Start with my feet.”

“Say ‘please.’”

“Please,” Elio says, and lies down on his stomach.

Oliver has just finished the first foot and is starting the second when he says, “You know, speaking of Levinson – ”

“Let’s not,” Elio murmurs into the pillow.

“I did want to talk to you about something he said.” Oliver presses his thumb into the arch of Elio’s foot. “The ‘strict monogamy’ part.”

Elio closes his eyes. “Is this the part where you tell me you want an open marriage?”

“Kind of the opposite, actually.”

“Is this the part where you tell me you’ll kill me if I ever cheat on you?”

“What? No.” The oil smells faintly of vanilla and Elio breathes in the scent. “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here. I know you’ve had some...adventures in the past, and – ”

“And you haven’t?”

“Not quite the same kind you seem to have had, no.”

Oliver is Elio’s fourth language, and he knows that the translation is, _I never spent an evening sprawled on a stranger’s bed getting fucked at both ends._ He never should have told Oliver that story. It was less an episode in a tale of sexual picaresque and more a desperate attempt to please a boyfriend who was losing interest. 

He could say something hurtful right now if he wanted to. He could say, _At least I didn’t get jerked off by a visiting professor from Cambridge while I was married._ It was Oliver’s one physical infidelity and Elio knows he’s still deeply ashamed of it. But he doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t want to.

What he does say is, “We’re on the same page.”

“If you have any...needs that I can’t fulfill – ”

“I don’t. Not needs.”

“Okay.” Oliver’s hands move from Elio’s foot to his left calf. “If there’s ever a time when that’s not true anymore, I want you to tell me and we’ll talk about it, all right?”

At that moment, Elio realizes how desperately Oliver wants to keep him, and it terrifies and thrills him at the same time.

Oliver did not write to him after twenty years because he wanted to get back together. Oliver wrote to him after twenty years because he wanted to apologize. Elio still has the letter, though he hasn’t read it for some time, and he can still remember phrases from it. _Now that I have a sixteen-year-old son, I realize how young you were at seventeen...I regret the way I told you I was getting married, and I especially regret asking you if you minded...I’ve been divorced twice now and I hope you’ve found the happiness that I haven’t..._ The last lines read, _Despite everything, I still miss you very much. I guess I’ll have to live with that._

The phone rings in the living room, and Elio groans. “I should check the caller ID,” Oliver says. “In case it’s one of the kids – sorry, just a second – ”

A moment later he returns, and the phone is silent.

“Number unavailable,” he says, sitting back down on the bed and running his hands down Elio’s thighs. Elio’s cock twitches. “Probably a telemarketer.”

“No thighs yet,” Elio says. “You forgot my right calf.”

Oliver leans over and kisses the edge of his ear. Elio feels the brush of the beard Oliver started growing last week. “You’re right. I did.”

The word _calf_ reminds Elio of something Oliver mentioned last week. “Did you ever get your syllabus done?” he asks.

“Which one? I’ve got two left.”

“Greco-Roman Fucking.”

“That would be, ‘Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome.’ Yeah, I did. I decided to add _Against Timarchus_.”

Elio has never read it – despite what Oliver said to him once, there are some things he doesn’t know – but he does remember a spirited dinner table conversation between his father and some guests. “Where Aeschines argues that Timarchus should lose his citizenship privileges because he used to prostitute himself?”

“And squandered his inheritance, and bottomed for clients. That’s the one.”

Elio grins. “Wasting money and bottoming. Sounds like my undergraduate years.”

“Oh, you’d be a terrible citizen of fourth-century Athens.”

Oliver’s moved on to his thighs now. “Tell me the thing about the calf again,” Elio says softly.

“What?”

“The thing about the calf and the bull.”

Oliver laughs, and Elio relishes the sound. “What, is that your favorite bedtime story?”

“Tell me,” Elio insists.

“All right. The thing about the calf and the bull.” Elio feels Oliver’s palms press down just below his buttocks. “In ancient Greece, the _erastes_ , the older male lover, and the _eromenos_ , the younger one, would generally stop having sex after the _eromenos_ grew older and married. However, there were some couples who would continue to have sex after the _eromenos_ was past adolescence, and when that happened, the Greeks would excuse it by saying, ‘You can carry a bull if you carried the calf.’”

Elio remembers their last night in Bergamo, when he was so, so drunk, and Oliver carried him to bed. The feel of the sheets, and the heat of their bodies together – 

A phone rings again, but this time it’s Oliver’s cell phone, which he’s left on top of the dresser. “Don’t get it,” Elio says. 

“I have to. It could be something with Aaron – sorry, just a second – ”

Aaron, Oliver’s older son, is having a difficult time with his father’s impending marriage. Two times in the last week, Julie’s called Oliver to tell him that Aaron’s snuck out of the house. Oliver went to Julie’s to talk with Aaron about it; Aaron’s response was, _oh, I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you thought seventeen-year-olds could make adult decisions._ Oliver, Julie and Elio are all supposed to meet with Aaron’s therapist on Tuesday.

But the phone call isn’t Aaron, or about Aaron. 

Oliver opens the phone and takes a deep breath. “Hi, Mom.”

Elio sits up.

Oliver’s mother’s name is Naomi, and, as she’s reminded Oliver several times, she’s not like his father – Ira, who would have carted Oliver off to a correctional facility and who Oliver and Elio are both glad Elio never met. Naomi, she’s told Oliver more than once, does not have a problem with homosexuals having relationships, because they don’t love women and that’s how they are and they might as well do what they can to be happy. But Oliver, with his first marriage that he tried to save and his second marriage to one of the most feminine women imaginable, is not a homosexual, and Naomi can’t fathom why he’d ruin his life this way when he doesn’t have to. 

Elio can’t hate Naomi, because parts of Oliver that he loves have come straight from her. They have the same eyes, though Naomi’s are getting cloudy with age, and Oliver’s love of classics originates from his mother and the Greek mythology lessons she taught in her ninth-grade English class for thirty years. It was Naomi who bought Oliver the complete Oxford English Dictionary for an eighth-grade graduation present. But Elio doesn’t know if he can forgive Naomi, either, because of how her expectations and emotional stuntedness have shaped Oliver’s life. Naomi is not a nurturing person, at least not in the way Elio’s own mother is. As far as Elio can tell, all of Oliver’s warmth and sweetness originates from his grandmother, the late, great Bubbe Essie.

And, of course, there’s the fact that it’s two weeks before the wedding and Naomi hasn’t sent back her RSVP.

“I was wondering if we were going to hear from you,” Oliver says, sitting on the chair by the window.

Naomi replies, but the only word Elio can make out is _questions_.

Oliver looks surprised. “Okay. Go ahead.”

The first question is very long. Elio traces his fingers over the patches of their quilt; it’s an engagement present from Marzia, who wanted to sew them something they’d always keep. Elio rounded up clothes, sheets and tablecloths and sent them to her in Paris. His hand moves from his Talking Heads t-shirt to the sheet on the bed the night he and Oliver got engaged, from his college commencement gown to the blue shirt Oliver left him with so many years ago.

Eventually, Oliver sighs. “No, Mom, I didn’t ask the Perlmans if I could take their last name. I don’t think I really needed to, either...what? No, Mom – _Mom_. It’s not – the hyphenated last name isn’t about rejecting anyone, all right? It has a lot of personal significance for Elio and me, and – ” Elio still can’t make out what Naomi is saying, but he can tell that she’s speaking very quickly. “I know. You don’t have to like it, but that’s what we’re doing. What’s your next question?”

The second question is short. “You’re supposed to call him Elio.” Elio grins.

Retort, clarification. “Well, he _will_ be your son-in-law, so...”

The questions go on and on, and Elio flops back on the bed and does his best to accept that the mood of massage night is ruined. Yes, Oliver tells Naomi, _stepfather_ is the right term for what Elio will be to Aaron and Alex. Yes, Oliver will be Johanna’s stepfather – one of two stepfathers, because Veronica is married to Richard. Yo- _ha_ -nah. Not Jo- _ann_ -a. Yes, they are actually planning to redo their wills, but that’s not anything Naomi needs to concern herself with...

After a while, Elio stops listening and just looks at Oliver.

At forty-five, he’s still movie-star handsome, although definitely older; there are a number of lines around his eyes and mouth, and within the last year he’s stopped pulling out his silver hairs and decided to accept them. Unlike Elio, he hasn’t gained any weight in middle age – he still goes running in the mornings – but his muscles aren’t quite as defined as they were at twenty-four. The beard makes him look very professorial. When he wears shorts now, they’re several inches longer than they were that first summer. The exact same Star of David still hangs from his neck. Elio looks at it and says a silent prayer to the God that Oliver has more faith in than he does.

_Don’t let her put him through all this and then tell him she’s not coming to the wedding. Don’t let her do that to him. I almost never ask you for anything, but I’m asking for this now. Don’t let her do that to Oliver._

“Kimberley, Brad, the kids, Mark and Susan, Emily – would you – no, Mom. You wouldn’t have to make a toast. Are you – ” A smile lights up Oliver’s entire face. “That’s great, Mom. I – “ He’s silent as Naomi speaks. “I’ll have Aaron and Alex pick you up. I’m really glad you’re coming, Mom. You don’t know how much – yeah, I know. I understand that this isn’t easy for you.” Naomi replies, and suddenly Oliver’s eyes are bright with tears; Elio’s tempted to grab the phone and demand to know what Naomi’s saying to him. “Well, Mom, like Bubbe Essie always said, _Mann tracht, Gott lacht_.” _Man plans, God laughs_. “I know. This isn’t how I envisioned my life either, but – that’s because I thought I couldn’t have it, not because I didn’t want it. I’ll – Mom? I’ll call you back tomorrow, okay? Bye.” He closes the phone, drops it on the floor, and leans back in the chair, closing his eyes.

Oliver is still fully dressed and Elio’s completely naked; Elio gets up from the bed and takes his hand. “She’s coming to the wedding?”

“She’s coming to the wedding.” Oliver opens his eyes, smiles, and kisses Elio’s stomach. “Come here.”

They have quick, intense sex, with Elio bent over the chair and Oliver thrusting into him from behind. When Oliver comes, Elio closes his eyes to savor the wet heat inside of him; when Oliver’s caught his breath, he lifts Elio as if he weighs nothing, sets him on the bed, and sucks him off. Afterwards they lie together in a tangle of limbs, and Elio basks in the knowledge that they get to do this forever. After all, they’re not even newlyweds yet.

“On our wedding night,” Elio tells Oliver, “I want you to carry me over the threshold.”

**Author's Note:**

> Not being Jewish, I did a ridiculous amount of research to make sure that Elio and Oliver could have gotten married by a rabbi in Massachusetts in 2004.
> 
> Thanks go out to whichever forgotten professor taught me about "Against Timarchus."


End file.
